Question: Common Sense and Biblical Updates?

I don't know where to post this, so I felt I'll probably get some bites on here.

I've been gnawing on this concept for a while now, and want to know what you guys feel about this. Christians say that God wrote the Bible. (Some say he himself didn't write it, but that he 'had' other people to write it for him, such as Moses and the other disciples). But what I don't get is that they say that God still exists to this very moment, yet the last time he 'spoke' to someone where they wrote scripture was 2000 years ago.

I do understand that if someone, such as our next door neighbor, wrote a book of scripture and said God told him/her to write it, that she/he would end up in a mental facility.

But still, why was the last time God spoke 2000 years ago? Both we atheists and some Christians who want to get away with 'sinning' state that the laws of God are outdated. Most of us wear cotton blends, a lot of us engage in premarital sex, we don't stone our deflowered daughters to death anymore.

Wouldn't the Big Man Upstairs have already updated his ancient encyclopedia? Wouldn't he talk about the history of Christianity through the Lost/Middle ages through to the present?

Replies to This Discussion

There are almost as many stupid excuses for this as there are Christians. One of the ones I've heard a lot is that he DOES talk to people all the time. That's the whole personal relationship with Christ nonsense.

I'm sure that their god isn't writing any more books of the bible though, because clearly, it's already complete and perfect and doesn't need anything added to it. Funny how I mostly hear this from people who haven't read the Bible.

What's almost worse is the idiots who read the Bible and glaze over all of the insane stuff, because they're reading it through their God-is-all-good-and-anything-that-contradicts-that-is-just-too-wonderful-for-me-to-understand filter.

Jerica O'Hagan, you are right, if there were a god, he/she/it would have brought paperwork up-to-date, just to clean up all the contradictions. As to the old laws, from old and new books, they don't do anything to cause the human race or the planet to flourish. That is the test of a parenting system, do the children flourish? or an education system, do students flourish? or political systems, does the nation flourish? and economic systems, do they empower individuals and institutions to flourish?

The more talk I heard from candidates and voters the more I realized we still act as if god ordained policies and practices that prove to be flawed. Make your voice heard! You are on the right track!

All religions claim that their scriptures were dictated by the God, the omnipotent must be impotent to know that he could not create a single religion so that at least it was one religion and one scripture. Secondly, if God wrote holy books how come they are not the same, as well why did God let Buddha create a religions which did not give any place to God in its scripture. So who is spreading lies God and His believers?

While we're on the subject of bat-shit, or as the British say, "barking mad," cults, I disagree with the premise. True, he no longer writes books (Papyrus Publishers must have went out of business). Now, he talks to people directly. Two of these cults promoting the tin can and string theory of communication come to mind. Evangelical Christians and Mor(m)ons.

The former run around, waving their arms in the air, and claim to get personal advice on such pressing problems as what to job to take, what car to buy, and whether the local high school football team will beat their cross town rivals. Rape, pedophilia, child starvation, genocide, well, not so important.

As to the latter, this seems to be the foundation of the cult. From 'Ole Joe Smith being told to have multiple wives, to Warren Jeffs being told that these brides should be pre-pubescent children, to the Lafferty brothers being told to slit the throats of their sister-in-law and 15 month old niece.

Instead of Abraham, Moses, and a long line of Popes, he's decided to skip the middle man and go right to his customer base.

If anyone asks me if I've talked to god lately, I say "no but I did have a little chat with the Easter Bunny yesterday".

Really, if you hear anyone say they are talking to god, be very very careful with them. They are dangerous, think suicide bomber.

On the main point of this discussion, if I were god, I sure wouldn't have asked some ancient desert goat herder to write my book for me. They really don't know who wrote any of it. Much of it is a conglomeration of old traditions from that part of the world.

Jerica, I think you would really enjoy the book by Bart Ehrman called Misquoting Jesus.

For your pleasure, take a look at the above article from Wikipedia. Their estimate is 41,000. And why should there be so many denominations? I think it's obvious. Every Christian has their own personal invisible imaginary pretend friend and he (it's always a he) is telling each of them something different. Think about it. This is one of the reasons it's so hard to talk to them about specific things until you find out first what that individual believes. Otherwise they may just say "well, I don't believe that part". And it still makes sense to them, somehow . . . I don't know. It's hard even to find two people in the same church that believe everything exactly the same.

This quote is from the book Man Made God by Barbara G Walker

... if there were a God wishing to get a particular message across to humans, he has certainly gone about it in the most muddleheaded way imaginable.